If you’re passionate about Evernote, the Web- and mobile-based storage platform for personal notes and other documents, chances are you’re in San Francisco this week for the third annual Evernote Conference. It’s the high point of the year for Evernote power users (like me) and for people building third-party applications that make Evernote more useful.
But unfortunately, it will all be over by Friday night. True Evernote groupies—and it’s definitely the kind of company that has groupies—would probably love to stay around longer, and maybe even hang out with Evernote engineers at the company’s Redwood City, CA, headquarters.
Now a few of them will get that chance. The company plans to announce at the conference’s closing session on Friday that six of the teams competing in Devcup 2013, its annual developer contest, will be invited to Evernote HQ for an all-expenses-paid, four-week accelerator program, starting Oct. 21.
All of the app builders being considered for the accelerator are from outside the U.S., reflecting Evernote’s big international user base.
The idea behind the Evernote Accelerator is to “encourage teams that are doing cool Evernote integrations to take their projects to the next level, by giving them access to a great startup curriculum, giving them the opportunity to work more closely with Evernote engineers and businesspeople and marketers, and introducing them to the Silicon Valley ecosystem,” says Rafe Needleman, Evernote’s director of developer relations.
Unlike most accelerator operations, such as 500 Startups or Techstars, the Evernote Accelerator won’t make equity investments in its admitted companies. But it will give the teams office space and pay their expenses while they’re here in the Bay Area. Evernote will offer company-building lessons drawn from the lean startup paradigm, and it will run workshops that pair the visiting teams with Evernote engineers and designers, giving them a look under the hood of the Evernote platform. “We are investing, but just in a different way,” says Needleman.
In the big picture, what’s going on here is that Evernote is looking for ways to keep growing its ecosystem of outside developers, who are a big boon to the company, since they build features that make Evernote more interesting at zero cost to Evernote itself.
Back in 2010, the company decided that it was time to start thinking beyond the central Evernote application—software for the Web, Mac and Windows desktops, and a range of mobile devices that lets users store Web clips, text notes, snapshots, PDFs, audio files, and many other types of content. It opened up the application programming interface, or API, that other companies needed in order to build apps that interact with Evernote. And it collected these apps in a kind of directory called the Evernote Trunk. (In fact, for the first two years, the company’s annual developer conference was called the Evernote Trunk Conference; this year it junked the “Trunk.”)
Most examples of Evernote integration are pretty simple. Content-focused apps like Pocket or Postbox, for instance, give users the option to transfer articles or e-mails into their Evernote notebooks. But occasionally, the integration goes much deeper. A visual phone conferencing service called UberConference, for example, lets users tap into their Evernote notebooks during a group call and share notes with other participants.
In two cases so far—Skitch and Penultimate—Evernote has acquired apps that complement the company’s own software and brought their creators into the company. But that’s been the exception rather than the rule. Even as other big Internet companies like Twitter are restricting the roles outside developers can play, in other words, Evernote seems to be happy to let outsiders build much of the stuff that makes the Evernote service useful.
“Evernote is a company that makes a service that helps you remember things,” Needleman explains. “There are a million things that can be done with that type of service, and we only make the app. The more ways there are to put information in and take it out—whether we make it or somebody else makes it—the happier users are. And happier users means a better business for us.”
Through the accelerator, which was first announced in April, developers from outside Silicon Valley will get the opportunity to integrate their software even more tightly with Evernote, as well as a crash course in the software business. “Whatever the magic we have here—and I don’t think it’s arrogant to say that this is a magical environment to build a startup in—I want people to experience it and get contacts and meet other people who are doing the same thing, and then take that message back to their countries and keep the entrepreneurship going,” Needleman says.
One of the companies vying for admission to the accelerator is Input Logic, based on Vancouver Island, BC. The company has developed a tool called Postach.io that lets Evernote users transform notes in their Evernote notebooks into public blog posts. To turn a note into a blog post, all a user has to do is
